“Hello little brother. I’m calling to tell you happy late birthday and I love you. I hate calling people on their actual birthdays because everyone gets so inundated with calls, but it’s also an excuse to seem like I have my act together when I call the next day. I want you to know how much I love you. I know today is tough, but I’m grateful that I have you to remind me so much of him. Call me when you’re free my dear.”
David’s birthday is a day after my fathers: January 10th and January 11th, as if the same sculptor got sentimental after 35 years and decided to make a second version of a master piece. Little blonde babies who grew up to be such good men. They’re men who are examples of men: brave, kind, forgiving, openly loving. Daddy was voraciously curious and learned how to take apart radios, build things, solve mechanical problems and fly planes. David was an evolution for the modern age and grew up fixing computer systems, a natural scientist. Eventually he’ll be a doctor. Both of them were curious kids with their left brains firing on all cylinders and, unlike most indoor kids, their hearts firing too.
I remember when David was born. I was 13. I think of my father, then around my age, and how he must have felt to have another baby boy coming into the world. None of us had any idea how much we would love him and how much he would change our lives for being ours.
Daddy worked nights at the Ford factory in Hapeville, so it was strange when he was home when we came home from school. I remember sitting in the dining room after school, which quickly turned into the “toy room,” and hearing that my mom was in labor. Daddy left and we waited. I thought at the time that David had missed my whole life, which seemed so long, and maybe he’d never really know me.
I didn’t realize that he would be born with the same blood and the same bones and me, mom, Kristen, Daniel and Daddy. I didn’t realize he would speak our language right from the start: that he’d interpret our wrinkled foreheads, slumped shoulders or sparkling eyes like sign language. He was built of my parents, and he would spend the first years of his life deciphering us. It’s not just that a baby’s role is to understand his family’s energy, it’s also that he cared how we felt. Before he could speak he could read our minds and our feelings and it was his instinct to be tender and in tune. He knew me better than almost anyone else was capable of knowing me.
My mom would say “his little body is like a mini-version of daddy” as he would prance across the yard. I’d hold David and he’d squeal like a lion cub. I’d sing to him on the couch and his face would get somber and emotional. His hair was Targarian white. He never looked as cute in pictures as he did in real life and I’d think please please please God, let me remember him exactly like this — no medium can capture him. Just let me keep him just like this.
I gave baby David his first slice of watermelon and it occurred to me that at some point everyone gets to experience watermelon for the first time. His face lit up like what is this magic? We were wizards. When we gave him a lemon his little face shook like what is this betrayal? and then weirdly, he wanted more.
We took him to the ocean when he was tiny and he was the happiest I have ever seen anyone to this day, including him.
“Mini-me,” my dad would call him, and baby David would beam with pride, and I’d look at their tan hands and hope that I could keep them both exactly how they are. I didn’t realize that I would only love them both more and more over the years, as we got older and could still read each other’s sparkling eyes.
When daddy died David was there by his bedside taking care of him and again I saw the gentleness he got from my father. I only get to keep a part of him in myself, but I am grateful that there were two similar versions.
Please please please. Don’t let me forget any of it. Just let me keep them just like this.
